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See! I Said You Could

Last week I said that whenever you ask us if you can do something with Accordance, we usually answer with a simple and straightforward, "Yes, you can!" Of course, the danger of making such a claim is that I'm practically inviting you to test its validity. So I wasn't at all surprised to get the following "challenge" in the comments on that post:

Not a comment, but a challenge. I want to create a greek analytical lexicon arranged by dictionary form (not alphabetically) with all subsequent forms underneath it with frequencies. How do I do this w/o manually entering every word stem (6060 words)? Any help appreciated!

So can he do it? Yes he can! Better yet, it's incredibly easy to do. In fact, Helen has already spelled out the steps required in the comments on that previous post. I'll recount those steps here to provide a little more detail.

Any time you're wanting a statistical breakdown of all the words in a text (such as the tagged Greek New Testament), you need to begin by searching for every word in that text. You do that by clicking the Words button in your Search window, entering an asterisk wildcard to represent any word, and clicking the Find button. Instantly every word in the GNT-T will be highlighted.

Now that you've found every word in the text, you can analyze every word that was found by clicking the understated Details button. A Details workspace will open, probably showing tabs for the Hits Graph and the Analysis (depending on your settings). If an Analysis tab is present, click the tab to bring it to the front. If there's no such tab open, click the Analysis button to open one.

By default, the Analysis lists every lexical form found by your search, its English meaning, and the number of times it was found. However, you can customize the display of the Analysis to show whatever information you like. To do this, select Set Analysis Display from the Display menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-T).

A dialog will open with a series of columns representing the different elements of your search. Since we only searched for one thing (the asterisk representing any word) only the first column is relevant. You can see that it currently contains only the LEX item, which is why all the lexical forms are listed. By dragging additional items into this first column, we can break our search results down by other criteria.

The person who issued the challenge wanted a listing of each "dictionary form" (that is, lexical form), with all "subsequent forms" (that is, inflected forms) listed beneath it. To accomplish this, simply drag the INFLECT item underneath the LEX item in the first column. Like this:

Now simply click OK to see the modified Analysis display:

Note how each lexical form is listed along with its number of occurrences. It is then further broken down by inflected form. If I'm understanding the challenge correctly, we've already achieved what was requested. But we can go further still. Let's say we go back to the Set Analysis Display and drag the TAG item between the LEX and INFLECT items. We'll then get an Analysis which looks like this:

Note how each lexical form is now broken down by grammatical form, with inflected forms listed underneath. By adding the grammatical tag, I've reshuffled the inflected forms so that related forms are listed together, rather than all the inflected forms merely being listed in alphabetical order.

See, I told you most of your "Can I?" questions can be answered with a simple and straightforward, "Yes you can!" And in most cases, the method required to accomplish your goal is simple and straightforward as well.

Archived Comments

Joshua E. Stewart

August 03, 2010 6:50 PM

Here is one for you. Is there a way to switch between two text in a hypertext link in the instant details window? For example: I am using ABD and I put my cursor on an OT passage. I have my primary text set to BHS and the secondary to the NASB. Is it possible to switch the text from BHS to NASB with a shortcut key? I realize the alternate text is for when the hyperlink is not found in the primary text, but can you switch. My Hebrew is not always as good as I wish :) Thanks

John Lee

August 03, 2010 11:59 PM

What I always want is to import a Bible in Chinese...

michael

August 04, 2010 1:16 AM

Where is Mounce's 3rd Edition instead of his fourth? Will it become available anytime time soon?

Helen Brown

August 18, 2010 11:29 PM

Josh: Sorry, Instant Details doesn't offer that option. However, it's easy to switch the texts in a text window. If both texts are in your top 10 texts in the Library window you can use control and the number of the text in your list to switch the search text or the text order text. Although, wouldn't it be easier to open the window with your default text, add a pane with the other preferred text, leave the window open to be recycled and click the reference each time to see both texts.

Mary Hinkle Shore

August 19, 2010 6:55 PM

Thanks, David. This has inspired me to play around a bit with the analysis window and its options.

Is there a way to see words from a particular pericope listed in order of the frequency with which they occur in the whole NT? For instance, could one get a list of the words in Col 1:1-14 from the most rare (in the NT, not in the pericope) to the most frequently occurring? I can't quite figure out how to automate this in Accordance.